Capricorn

Leonardo's
Psalm 2:1
"Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing?"

Tropical Sunset

Soaking up the Sun

Chess: "Leonardo's" "Capricorn"

THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION
VOLUME TWO
THE LIFE OF GREECE
1939
by Will Durant

MY purpose is to record and contemplate the origin, growth,
maturity, and decline of Greek civilization from the oldest remains of
Crete and Troy to the conquest of Greece by Rome. I wish to see and
feel this complex culture not only in the subtle and impersonal rhythm
of its rise and fall, but in the rich variety of its vital elements:
its ways of drawing a living from the land, and of organizing industry
and trade; its experiments with monarchy, aristocracy, democracy,
dictatorship, and revolution; its manners and morals, its religious
practices and beliefs; its education of children, and its regulation
of the sexes and the family; its homes and temples, markets and
theaters and athletic fields; its poetry and drama, its painting,
sculpture, architecture, and music; its sciences and inventions, its
superstitions and philosophies. I wish to see and feel these
elements not in their theoretical and scholastic isolation, but in
their living interplay as the simultaneous movements of one great
cultural organism, with a hundred organs and a hundred million
cells, but with one body and one soul.......
..........

Excepting machinery, there is hardly anything secular in our culture
that does not come from Greece. Schools, gymnasiums, arithmetic,
geometry, history, rhetoric, physics, biology, anatomy, hygiene,
therapy, cosmetics, poetry, music, tragedy, comedy, philosophy,
theology, agnosticism, skepticism, stoicism, epicureanism, ethics,
politics, idealism, philanthropy, cynicism, tyranny, plutocracy,
democracy: these are all Greek words for cultural forms seldom
originated, but in many cases first matured for good or evil by the
abounding energy of the Greeks. All the problems that disturb us
today- the cutting down of forests and the erosion of the soil; the
emancipation of woman and the limitation of the family; the
conservatism of the established, and the experimentalism of the
unplaced, in morals, music, and government; the corruptions of
politics and the perversions of conduct; the conflict of religion
and science, and the weakening of the supernatural supports of
morality; the war of the classes, the nations, and the continents; the
revolutions of the poor against the economically powerful rich, and of
the rich against the politically powerful poor; the struggle between
democracy and dictatorship, between individualism and communism,
between the East and the West- all these agitated, as if for our
instruction, the brilliant and turbulent life of ancient Hellas. There
is nothing in Greek civilization that does not illuminate our own........
........
AS we enter the fairest of all waters, leaving behind us the
Atlantic and Gibraltar, we pass at once into the arena of Greek
history. "Like frogs around a pond," said Plato, "we have settled down
upon the shores of this sea." Even on these distant coasts
the Greeks founded precarious, barbarian-bound colonies many centuries
before Christ: at Hemeroscopium and Ampurias in Spain, at Marseilles
and Nice in France, and almost everywhere in southern Italy and
Sicily. Greek colonists established prosperous towns at Cyrene in
northern Africa, and at Naucratis in the delta of the Nile; their
restless enterprise stirred the islands of the Aegean and the coasts
of Asia Minor then as in our century; all along the Dardanelles and
the Sea of Marmora and the Black Sea they built towns and cities for
their far-venturing trade. Mainland Greece was but a small part of the
ancient Greek world.